Theater review.

A Few Words Speak Loudly For Beckett

April 25, 1993|By Lawrence Bommer, a freelance theater writer.

With playwright Samuel Beckett less is always more. The late dramatist pioneered an uncompromising minimalism, increasingly paring down his plays to purvey a cryptic, often incongruously hilarious gospel of toxic despair.

It was a fitting style for revelations that went deeper than words- and, inevitably dispensed with them together.

Last year's inaugural "Buckets o' Beckett" featured two nights of short works. Splinter Group's current, single-night edition offers five-wide-ranging one-acts. Characteristic samplings from all stages of Beckett's career, they testify to his gallows humor, autobiographical obsessions and social satire.

In "Acts Without Words-2" from 1965, Beckett turns to mime to depict the sterility of habit. Playing A and B Ted de Moniak and Robin MacDuffie are two men who respond quite differently to being awakened by a probing stick hand. One exercises and grooms; the other can barely rouse himself. It doesn't matter; the call of sleep lures both back into their sleeping blankets as if they never left.

In contrast, "Footfalls" (1975) depicts insomnia. Karen Gunderson plays Beckett's mother. May, a memory-haunted woman who paces outside the room where her own mother lies dying. May poignantly appeals for permission to mourn; whether for herself or her mother hardly matters.

In a lighter vein, "Come and Go" (1965) is spoken by three identically dressed women (Patty Kunz, Gundersen and Kerry Reid. Obliquely linked to the witches in "Macbeth," they also suggest the ancient harridans of Beckett's childhood memories. Whenever one ritually leaves the room, the others gossip about her; when together, they sink into nostagia for past encounters.

The most complex piece, the 1959 radio play "Embers," shows the author at his most memory-mongering. Angrily debating with his drowned father and now-dead wife, Matt O'Brien powerfully portrays Henry, Beckett's suffering surrogate.

In the most recent work, "What Where (1983), four identically clad characters (named Bom, Bim and Bem) are ordered by a downstage voice (DeMoniak) to enact enigmatic scenes, each meant to trigger his desire to write. They don't.

Lapsing into a grave terseness, here Beckett seems to do nothing less than audition for oblivion.